Sunday, August 31, 2014

Sunday August 31, 2014 

Matthew 5:1-12:  The Beatitudes

Along with the Ten Commandments, the Twenty-Third Psalm, and a few others, the Beatitudes are one of the best known passages in the whole Bible.  Hundreds of books have been written about them and the Sermon on the Mount they introduce (Matt. 5 – 7), and there are at least as many opinions as there are books.  Some authors think the Sermon on the Mount was meant only to make us feel guilty because we cannot possibly obey it, or it only intends to drive us to our knees confessing our sins, or perhaps (if we’re up to the challenge) it will inspire us to lofty heights of sainthood.  Some books water down the message into such simple platitudes that no one can disagree and no one is challenged.  Some authors think the Sermon was never intended for us, but either (authors disagree) for some past time that never came or some speculative future age (or both).  With such confusion, how can we possibly hope to do more than see in the Beatitudes worthy, noble precepts that are impossibly beyond our reach?

But Jesus was down to earth, and we can be quite sure he intended his first hearers (if they thought hard) would make good sense of the Beatitudes.  And these hearers were ordinary people, working all day long for a very modest living.  They were certainly not professional theologians with the time and ability to argue over subtleties of interpretation.  Jesus’ disciples must indeed have made sense of the Beatitudes, and surely found them important, as well as surprising and disturbing, since they remembered them for decades until Matthew (or his source) first wrote them down.

When a Bible story is hard to understand, it is often helpful to try placing it into its original context.  Let’s do so, concentrating only on the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus was just starting his public ministry, after the arrest of John the Baptizer.  Jesus proclaimed the same message as John, “Change your life.  God’s kingdom is here.” [The Message, Matt. 3:2, 4:17]  Large crowds were attracted to Jesus, as he taught in the synagogues and healed many people.  Jesus was in Galilee, his home area where he was known and many people came to hear him, see his miracles of healing, and would start to follow him.  In Galilee almost all the people were dirt poor, working as hard as they could to stave off starvation, often sharecropping or paying rent to rich landowners, many of whom lived in Jerusalem or elsewhere.  There was effectively no middle class, only a few better educated, more prosperous people such as the scribes and Pharisees who ruled the synagogues and told the masses what they needed to do to keep God’s law (as understood by the scribes and Pharisees) and stay out of trouble.

But the Sermon on the Mount was not given in a synagogue where the scribes and Pharisees were in charge; it was outdoors up a mountainside.  Jesus addressed his disciples primarily, and the crowds came along too (see Matt. 7:28).  I wonder what they all would have thought when Jesus began, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  What a strange statement.

Some people, you see, appear to have it all together, spiritually speaking, while others don’t have a clue.  Those first listeners must have generally thought the Pharisees were the people who had it all together.  They knew all about God; they read the scriptures; they kept all God’s requirements.  Most of the people were too poor and uneducated to master all that; it was so hard for them, working long hours just to keep body and soul together, that they couldn’t possibly understand everything God wanted them to know; it was all they could do just to go to synagogue on the Sabbath and listen to the Pharisees,  Even so, they would usually go home feeling confused and more guilty than they started, because they knew they couldn’t keep up.  Many of them lost interest; they just gave up on spiritual matters because they were complete failures.  Surely the scribes and Pharisees were the ones who were rich in spirit; the poor masses felt that they were poor in spirit for sure; they felt like complete spiritual zeros.

Now Jesus starts by saying the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven, which means the same thing) belongs to the poor in spirit.  What a strange kingdom this is!  Could it really be that God actually cares about people who are spiritual zeros?  If they are to be the ones in the kingdom of God – the ones to whom the kingdom belongs – what an amazing surprise!  It must be that God gives his blessings solely out of his generosity and love, not because people deserve it at all.  The people who thought God had forgotten them completely are the ones who find themselves especially blessed and in the center of God’s love and mercy, God’s kingdom.  Could what Jesus is saying actually be true?  They had seen him healing people, casting out demons, and surely such miracles were a mark of God’s special authority on him.  So perhaps those people, the scribes and Pharisees, who thought they were pretty good, who were proud they kept all the rules and felt superior to other people, who were so critical of Jesus – perhaps they will find themselves on the outside looking in.  This sounds like good news for the poor and not so good for the proud rich.  Indeed, this is an upside-down kingdom, where the last shall be first, the poor shall be rich, notorious sinners are welcome, and those who think they have it made discover they are no longer first but are last.  Maybe the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, too, is what really describes how God wants us all to live.  Maybe the crowds were right to be astounded at Jesus’ teaching, because he taught them as one having authority, not like their scribes.

How about us?  Do we find the teachings of Jesus astounding, or are we so familiar with them we are no longer surprised?  Do we pay any attention, or have we come to ignore what Jesus teaches?  Do we find that Jesus teaches with authority, or is he just one of many voices clamoring for our attention?  

[Note: Of the few books I have read on the kingdom of God and Sermon on the Mount, three I have found especially helpful are:

• The Kingdom of God is a Party, by Tony Campolo, 150 pages, Word Publishing, 1990.
• The Upside-Down Kingdom, by Donald  Kraybill, 320 pages, Herald Press, 2011.
• The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard, 428 pages, HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.]

- Robert Kruse